When a rare genius like Albert Einstein comes along, scientists naturally wonder if he had something special between his ears. The latest study of Einstein's brain concludes that certain parts of it were indeed very unusual and might explain how he was able to go where no physicist had gone before when he devised the theory of relativity and other groundbreaking insights. The findings also suggest that Einstein's famed love of music was reflected in the anatomy of his brain.

 象愛因斯坦這樣的曠世奇才出現(xiàn)的時(shí)候，科學(xué)家們理所當(dāng)然地想知道其大腦是否有些不同尋常之處。對(duì)愛因斯坦大腦的最新研究得出結(jié)論：愛因斯坦大腦的某些特定的區(qū)域的確非常特別，這也許可以解釋當(dāng)提出相對(duì)論和其他突破性見解的時(shí)候，他何以能夠研究到其他任何物理學(xué)家都不曾涉足的領(lǐng)域。這些發(fā)現(xiàn)還表明，愛因斯坦對(duì)音樂的酷愛在其大腦的結(jié)構(gòu)上有所體現(xiàn)。

 When Einstein died in 1955 at Princeton Hospital in New Jersey, his brain was removed by a local pathologist named Thomas Harvey, who preserved, photographed, and measured it. A colleague of Harvey's cut most of the brain into 240 blocks and mounted them on microscope slides. From time to time, he sent the slides to various researchers, although few publications resulted. Harvey, who moved around the United States several times in the course of his career, kept the jar containing what remained of the brain in cardboard box. Finally, in 1998, Harvey--who died in 2007--gave the jar to the University Medical Center of Princeton, where it remains today.

 1955年，愛因斯坦逝世于新澤西州普林斯頓醫(yī)院之后，他的大腦被一個(gè)叫做托馬斯·哈維的病理學(xué)家摘除。哈維保存了愛因斯坦的大腦，為他的大腦拍了照片，并進(jìn)行了測量。哈維的一個(gè)同事將大腦的一大部分切成了240個(gè)小塊，并將這些小塊放在顯微鏡載片上，然后不斷地將這些載片送給不同的研究人員，然而這一行動(dòng)卻沒能帶來公開發(fā)表的研究成果。在整個(gè)生涯中，哈維在全美國遷居過好幾次，但一直用一個(gè)放在紙板盒里的廣口瓶保存著剩余的大腦。1998年，哈維最終將盛有大腦的廣口瓶送給普林斯頓大學(xué)醫(yī)學(xué)中心，至今仍在那里保存。哈維于2007年去世。

 The first anatomical study of Einstein's brain was published in 1999, by a team led by Sandra Witelson, a neurobiologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. Working from Harvey's photographs, which were all that remained of the whole brain, Witelson's team found that Einstein's parietal lobes--which are implicated in mathematical, visual, and spatial cognition--were 15% wider than normal parietal lobes. The team also found other unusual features in the parietal region, although some of these were questioned by other researchers at the time. One parameter that did not explain Einstein's mental prowess, however, was the size of his brain: At 1230 grams, it fell at the low end of average for modern humans.

 有關(guān)愛因斯坦大腦結(jié)構(gòu)的第一個(gè)研究成果發(fā)表于1999年，該研究是由加拿大漢密爾頓市麥克馬斯特大學(xué)的神經(jīng)生物學(xué)家桑德拉·維特爾森主持的。哈維的照片是關(guān)于愛因斯坦完整大腦的唯一資料。通過這些照片，維特爾森的研究小組發(fā)現(xiàn)愛因斯坦的頂葉比普通人的頂葉寬出15%。頂葉跟人的數(shù)學(xué)認(rèn)知、視覺認(rèn)知以及空間認(rèn)知能力有關(guān)。研究小組在頂葉區(qū)域還發(fā)現(xiàn)了其他不同尋常的特征，可是其中一些特征在當(dāng)時(shí)遭到了其他研究人員的質(zhì)疑。然而，有一個(gè)參數(shù)無法解釋愛因斯坦具有超凡的智能，那就是他大腦的重量：只有1230克，還達(dá)不到現(xiàn)代人類大腦的平均重量。

 Now Dean Falk, an anthropologist at Florida State University in Tallahassee, has taken another crack at the brain. Working from the same photographs and comparing Einstein's brain with a set of 25 previously published photographs and measurements of brains from cadavers, Falk claims to have identified a number of previously unrecognized unusual features in Einstein's brain. They include a pronounced knoblike structure in the part of the motor cortex that controls the left hand; in other studies, similar "knobs" have been associated with musical ability. (Einstein had played the violin avidly since childhood.)

 現(xiàn)在，位于塔拉哈西市的佛羅里達(dá)州立大學(xué)有一位人類學(xué)家名叫迪安·福爾克，她為了研究愛因斯坦的大腦，又做了一次嘗試。福爾克的研究同樣利用了愛因斯坦的大腦照片，并將這些照片與先前公開發(fā)表的一套25張大腦照片及數(shù)據(jù)進(jìn)行了對(duì)比，這些大腦來自不同個(gè)體的尸首。福爾克稱，她在愛因斯坦的大腦中發(fā)現(xiàn)了一些以前沒有認(rèn)識(shí)到的異常特征，其中包括：在控制左手的運(yùn)動(dòng)皮層上發(fā)現(xiàn)了顯著的球狀結(jié)構(gòu)；其他的研究發(fā)現(xiàn)，類似的球狀結(jié)構(gòu)跟愛因斯坦的音樂能力相關(guān)。眾所周知，愛因斯坦自幼酷愛小提琴。

 Like Witelson's team, Falk found that Einstein's parietal lobes were larger; comparing the photographs of Einstein's brain with a second previously published set of 58 control brains, Falk also identified a very rare pattern of grooves and ridges in the parietal regions of both sides of the brain that she speculates might somehow be related to Einstein's superior ability to conceptualize physics problems. Indeed, during his lifetime, Einstein often claimed that he thought in images and sensations rather than in words. Einstein's talent as "a synthetic thinker" may have arisen from the unusual anatomy of his parietal cortex, Falk concludes in her report in press in Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience.

 跟維特爾森的研究小組一樣，福爾克也發(fā)現(xiàn)愛因斯坦的頂葉較大。將愛因斯坦的大腦照片與另外一套已經(jīng)出版的58張大腦的對(duì)照照片進(jìn)行比較后，福爾克還發(fā)現(xiàn)，愛因斯坦的大腦兩側(cè)頂葉區(qū)域上的溝回圖案極為罕見。因此，她推測這在某種程度上跟愛因斯坦構(gòu)思物理問題的超常能力有關(guān)。確實(shí)，愛因斯坦在一生中常說自己是用形象和感覺進(jìn)行思維的，而不是用語言進(jìn)行思維的。福爾克得出結(jié)論，愛因斯坦作為一位“綜合思想家”的才華可能來自于其頂葉皮層非同尋常的構(gòu)造。福爾克將自己的報(bào)道寫進(jìn)正在印刷中的《進(jìn)化神經(jīng)科學(xué)前沿》一書。

 Yet Falk concedes that her interpretation is still hypothetical. Marc Bangert, a neuropsychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, seconds that reservation, saying, "It is very speculative, but this is what one has to deal with given the data available, some old photographs." Frederick Lepore, a neurologist at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey, says that Falk appears to have accurately identified a number of new features in the physicist's brain, and he finds the correlation between the motor cortex "knob" and Einstein's violin training to be "persuasive and intriguing." Nevertheless, Lepore says, he is "uneasy" with the suggestion that Einstein was a "parietal genius" who thought strictly in images and sensations, citing among other evidence his superior school grades in Latin and the sciences and mediocre marks in art and geography.

 然而，福爾克承認(rèn)自己的解釋仍然帶有假定的成分。馬普學(xué)會(huì)的人類認(rèn)知和大腦科學(xué)中心位于德國萊比錫市，該中心的神經(jīng)心理學(xué)家馬克·邦戈?duì)柼刭澇蛇@種留有余地的態(tài)度。他說：“該研究在很大程度上帶有推測的性質(zhì)，然而一個(gè)研究人員利用現(xiàn)有的特定資料和一些舊照片也只能做到這些了?！毙聺晌髦菪虏祭仕咕S克市羅伯特·伍德·約翰遜大學(xué)附屬醫(yī)院的神經(jīng)學(xué)專家弗雷德里克·勒珀?duì)柗Q：福爾克好象準(zhǔn)確地找出了物理學(xué)家愛因斯坦大腦中的一些新特征，運(yùn)動(dòng)皮層上的球狀結(jié)構(gòu)跟愛因斯坦的小提琴訓(xùn)練之間的相關(guān)性具有說服力，而且也很有趣。然而，勒珀?duì)栍终f：把愛因斯坦說成是一個(gè)確確實(shí)實(shí)用形象和感覺思維的“頂級(jí)天才”，讓人感到不安。他特地引用了愛因斯坦在學(xué)校時(shí)的成績作為證據(jù)：愛因斯坦在拉丁語和理科上的得分出眾，在藝術(shù)和地理上的得分卻一般。